In the winter, some of our red potatoes in the pantry got old and started sprouting, so we planted them in one of our planters. Last month, we had a harvest. It felt great digging with our bare hands into the soft soil and finding the potatoes, one at a time.
Here is a picture of the planter, after we had reseeded it with carrots this time.
The harvest was amazing. We got at least 30 potatoes, a few of them small, but some of them full sized. Here are some of the larger ones:
Then I noticed that each potato had a mark on it. I can’t figure out how this happened. They were not smashed against the planter, and its walls are smooth. There are no features that would cause these repeatable marks. If you don’t see it, look at this one closeup:
The marks are not the result of some tool that we used to get them out of the ground. We used our bare hands for every one of them.
I looked at red potatoes at the store and found no marks on any of them.
Does anyone have any idea what might be causing these marks?
Cue music from The Twilight Zone…
I landed here after google image-searching “machining marks on potatoes”, because I see these exact marks on many of my store-bought potatoes, and wasn’t sure if they were from the machines used during harvesting/separating/processing, or a result of the growing process around the area where buds and shoots grow, as the marks do often appear near those places. After finding this though, it must be the latter.
And googling “potato anatomy” confirms this. The dimples from where the shoots grow are referred to as “lateral buds”/”eyes”, and the often convex-shaped lines facing them are “scale leaves”.
Wow, thanks for your help. Just last week I planted the shoots for the next crop. I do this with my bare hands. I noticed that there are wood chips in my soil. That made sense. the chances of a new potato growing next to a chip are very high, so all potatoes will have some markings, as the chips get pushed aside by the growing potato. I think I solved the mystery, and your insight confirmed it. THANKS!